My favorite quote in the endless coverage of the September 11 attacks comes from the September 22 New York Times advertorial that assured us "Arab-Americans Are Finding New Tolerance Amid the Turmoil." Ismael Ahmed, Executive Director of the Detroit-based Access ("an organization that provides social services here for a large and growing community of Arab immigrants"), confronted with reports that Arabs had been excluded from airline flights at the demand of their alarmed fellow-passengers, reacted thusly,

"I feel sorry for people who don't understand yet what America has become," he said, referring to Americans who scapegoat their countrymen based on skin color or religion. "For them, I'm afraid, life is going to be miserable."

You see his point, of course. After all, because law enforcement authorities are too terrified to engage anything that can be smeared as "racial profiling," a lot of those Americans-who-scapegoat etc. etc. may very well be blown to bits. That's enough to make them pretty miserable.

But more importantly, the reason American law enforcement authorities, and politicians, are terrified is because public policy, beginning with the 1965 Immigration Act, has imported alien constituencies that have empowered ethnic political entrepreneurs like I. Ahmed. [Send him email.] Ahmed is very frankly telling Americans-who-scapegoat etc. etc. that government policy has caused their country to be taken away from them. Which should make them very miserable indeed.

And mad.

My second favorite quote: from Jonathan Tilove's Newhouse News Service story on the fear and trembling among our friends in the immigration enthusiast community in case anyone should notice their role in making possible the September 11 attacks: "Attacks Likely to Reverse Push to Ease Immigration."

Steve Moore, a senior fellow with the immigration enthusiast Cato Institute and head of the Club for Growth,

said that for immigration advocates like himself the best tack right now may be to "lay low and don't talk about it a lot.""

Yeah.

My message to Steve [email him], echoing the heavyweight champion Joe Louis: you can run, but you can't hide.